Goboogo : Austria

Showing posts with label Austria. Show all posts

Saturday, June 8, 2013

The goodness of Demel

Demel makes the best sweets in the world. We stopped by and ate a few things, and it did not disappoint. Earlier in the trip I promised an older Austrian man that I would visit Vienna for a year, but I had to also promise that I would never look at a bathroom scale. Now I know why he said that. The desserts here are exquisite.

This is a cool little shop in Vienna that only sells champagne. That's it. They specialize in single grape small-batch "microbrews" from estates in France. We were a little intimidated to enter in our rain suits, but we found warm service and were even offered free tastings, even though we insisted that we were leaving Vienna to soon to drink any champagne.

Figlmüller's perfect schnitzel in Vienna

On the recommendation of numerous people, including my grandparents and an Austrian man with a perfectly curled grey mustache and a penchant for British racing, we decided to try Figlmuller during our visit to Vienna for a heavy lunch.

After riding the subway all over Vienna for free, we saddled up next to these meaty disks the size of generous pizzas. The schniztzel was served simply with a lemon. The schnitzel has been served here for over 100 years and every serving is violently pounded to a thickness of 30mm. The Austrian emperor roll is used for the bread crumb breading and is perfectly crispy and light.

We stumbled upon this store in Vienna. It was all travel guides, travel books, and maps. It was like some kind of mecca for Kristin and I. We did not even know such places existed. At one point a sales associate came up to me and asked, "Can I help you?" I just stared off into space and replied, "No."

The ten oldest bars and restaurants in the world

I once drank at a pub in Ireland where Vikings had commiserated after invading the Green Isle. It was older than you or I, our great grandparents, or even the Magna Carta. It was from the dark ages for sure, and where once Vikings swilled brews, today, tourists eat fish and chips while locals complain about Eurozone politics. If you look closely enough and kind of squint at the Brazen Head, you can just barely picture middle ages Dublin. You can almost smell the smoke. If those walls could talk, they would tell the tale of mankind's ascent into a sophisticated society, for better and worse. I wondered while I sat at the bar scribbling into my little notebook, how many other really old places are out there?

It is rare for a restaurant or bar to last a very long time - where a long time is determined with a measuring stick notched in decades. The public houses, inns, and restaurants on this list evade conventional measurement, lasting centuries atop centuries. These are places where arguments took place about the events we only read about in history class. The oldest companies in the world are Japanese, but every spot on this list is European. The Germanic people, it seems, are especially adept at building things that last a very long time. They dominate this list.